A Clear Bright Future by Paul Mason

The author of PostCapitaism, Paul Mason in A Clear Bright Future brings to us a work of radical optimism. Living in a world with multiple crises, there is a need to strategize our ways out of these, says the author. The power to reorganise these is by catching hold of what currently looks unfashionable, which is gripping technology and rediscovering humanity.

Paul Mason has derived the title from the writing of Leon Trotsky. Mason like Trotsky has Karl Marx as his inspiration. A Clear Bright Future is an attempt to reinterpret Marx as a champion of humanist freedom. There is a passionate defence of humanity and a work of radical optimism. It aims to preserve what is humane in this world of uncertainty.

Technology, which is believed to be liberating, has opened vast asymmetries of knowledge and power. Through the screens that we continuously scroll, governments and corporations know what we are thinking and predict our next moves and influence our behaviour. While we do not have the right to sensor the monitoring we are liable to. This is the urgent political and moral crisis we are living through now, argues the author.

But the suggested solution is begins with a simple fundamental choice. To accept the machine control of human beings or resist it? It calls to imagine and redesign a better system, at the heart of which is a radical reassertion of our common humanity. These would help us not to relive an utopian past.